Legacy FOIA Software Tracks Requests. It Doesn't Do the Work.

Most agencies bought their FOIA software to get out of a spreadsheet and a shared inbox. It worked. Requests now come in through a form, land in a queue, get assigned to a department, and tick down against a statutory clock. But that software was designed around a simple idea of the job: keep track of the request. The work of answering it was left exactly where it was.

What legacy FOIA software was built for

Request management systems are, at heart, ticketing systems. They give requesters a front door, give staff a shared inbox, route requests to departments, count down deadlines, collect fees, and store every message. Some add a redaction screen: a viewer where a person draws boxes on a page and picks an exemption from a list.

That was a real step forward when these systems arrived. It also set a ceiling. Everything they do is organizing work that a person still has to do by hand.

Where it stops

The queue tells you a request is due Friday. It does not open the four hundred pages attached to it. Someone still has to read each page, spot a home address buried in a narrative paragraph, know that it counts as private information under the state's statute, redact it, and write down why. A redaction screen makes the box easier to draw. It does not find the address.

That reading, and the research behind each redaction, is where most of the hours in a request go, and it is the real cost of public records compliance. Tracking software does not change it, because the page count is the same no matter how neatly the request arrived.

The same work, over and over

Follow one request from start to finish and almost none of it is new. Staff dig for records by hand, running the same kinds of searches in email, shared drives, and case systems, then running them again with different terms because the first pass missed something. They read every line of what comes back to find what has to be redacted. For each item they work out which exemption applies, often from memory or an old response. Then they assemble the production, write the letter, and send it out.

Multiply that by every request, in every department, and a large share of an agency's staff is doing the same repetitive work every day: searching, reading, citing, and sending. Legacy software tracks each of those steps. It does not take any of them off anyone's desk.

By our estimate, 80 to 90 percent of that work follows patterns software can handle, and it can do it at scale: every page, every request, at the same time. What is left for people is the part that needs judgment. Responses go out much faster, and each one takes a fraction of the staff hours. That is the difference between software that tracks the work and software that does it.